Home Pooling: Applying co-governance to the housing sector

The article proposes the new emerging pooling forms of housing as expression of a new mutualisation wave and collective management of a shared resource, grounded on human connection and sharing; and it advances the emergence of a kind of “housing prosumer”. Grounding on Ostrom’s theory it applies the ‘City as a commons’ (Co-City) theoretical framework, trying to define whether innovations represented by forms of housing based on pooling practices are able to trigger urban regeneration processes and thereby satisfying the need of affordable housing. It builds on the result of an ongoing research on the housing sector supported by Federcasa and LabGov and demonstrates the importance of the enabling role of the State and how the implementation of complex level of collective governance in the housing sector required new forms of partnerships and caution in their experimentation to trigger a process of urban regeneration.